Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 30th May

Best Eurovision Moment
After Albania’s rather terrifying sub-Bjork performance, Graham Norton waited a beat, then said: “I’m pretty sure that, if they get her medication right, that need never happen again…”

Pete Doherty Interview by Geoffrey Macnab, The Guardian
Ah, poor Pete, treated badly by everybody as he makes his film debut in Confession of a Child of the Century. Take Charlotte Gainsbourg. She wasn’t “all that happy” about the production, which, he says he knows because he snuck into her room and looked at her journal [!]. She came in “as someone everyone knew but a complete stranger in the immediate environment… you couldn’t be a star.” It was freezing cold on location. Between takes, assistants would “leap on her with loads of blankets and hot-water bottles and I was stood there in 19th-century cotton with lots of holes in it.” And in prison: “It’s horrible, horrible. There are lots of aggressive, money-oriented, very masculine people, but at the same time, there is really nasty homoerotic violence. It’s not the place to be if you are a freethinking man.” And now there’s the film critics! The reviews have been overwhelmingly negative, with Doherty’s own performance deemed “catastrophic” and “calamitous.”

For what it’s worth, I have no great opinion on Doherty’s songwriting talent and I wasn’t impressed by The Libertines, but I saw him play a song at Hal Willner’s Disney night, The Forest of No Return, part of Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown at the Festival Hall in 2007. With a line-up of luminaries ranging from Nick Cave to Grace Jones (brilliantly terrifying on The Jungle Book’s Trust In Me) Pete took the stage to sing Chim Chim Cheree. We were sitting just behind Kate Moss, Pete’s then-inamorata, who was busy snapping photos. One of the few performers to have memorised the words, strumming a battered acoustic, he totally inhabited the song, and—singing beautifully—essayed a perfect and tender version, rescuing it forever from the clutches of Dick Van Dyke. And that’s no mean feat.

Reissue of the Week
Walked into a guitar shop to discover that Fender have reissued the Kingman, the acoustic played by Elvis, with its classic Fender headstock…

My prized Fender 1968 catalogue

A Night At The Opera
Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. English National Opera. Anthony Minghella’s production. Visually stunning in places. Rousing and expressive music. Awful story, that seems horribly outdated and verging on distasteful. Terrible clunky language which is hard to sing (Pinkerton: “I bought this house for nine hundred and ninety nine years, but with the option, at ev’ry month, to cancel the contract! I must say, in this country, the houses and the contracts are elastic!”). And then sung with seeming disregard for the melodies of the music floating underneath! Interview this week with Emma Rice, director of theatre group Kneehigh: Is there an artform you don’t relate to? “Opera. It’s a dreadful sound. It just doesn’t sound like the human voice.”

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about.me

On a need to know basis…

Plays primitive music on ramshackle guitars. Likes Julie London, Focus and John Fred & His Playboy Band, among others. Designs. Fair cook. On occasion, writes a song, usually with Mark Pringle. He is a freelance designer and art director based in London, England. London apparently swings, like a pendulum do.